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by Tolik
Tampa, Florida
July 5, 2003
For three centuries, the Earldom of Neuchâtel flourished, and in 1530, the people of Neuchâtel accepted the Reformation, and their city and territory were proclaimed to be indivisible from then on. On the death of their princess, Marie de Nemours (1707) the people of Neuchâtel asked the European princes to enforce their succession to the house of Orleans. In the end, they accepted the offer of the House of Hohenzollern, which was at the time reigning over Prussia. From 1806 to 1813, it was a Napoleonic Principality.
It took a bloodless revolution in the decades following for Neuchâtel to shake off its princely past and declare itself a republic within the Swiss Confederation (1848). Neuchâtel is the only one of the 26 to proudly fly a tricolor –- green, white and red, with a minute Swiss cross hanging in the top corner. Neuchâtel is also notable for its social policy: it was one of the first cantons to give women the right to vote in 1959 (twelve years before the rest of Switzerland). It is also the only one to have granted foreigners established for at least five years the right to vote in local elections.
From journal Neuchâtel, the city of 140 fountains